Special Edition ODP: The Book of These Incidents
"[These] are my principles, and if you don't like them . . . Well, I have others." - Groucho Marx
Prescript - Today is my birthday (hurray!) and I’m currently off the grid. Last week I pre-scheduled this post because I’m on a retreat at the new Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life. So welcome to back to ODP, shabbat shalom, and I’ll be back on the grid soon. The show must go on:
This past year, a friend took me to his church in Leipzig, Germany. A plaque in the entranceway with an image of Rabbi Jesus Christ said, “Jesus spricht: Wenn der Mensch nicht von neuem geboren wird, kann er das Reich Gottes nicht sehen.” I don’t speak German, and I know that Jesus definitely didn’t. Can you imagine how differently his teachings would resonate (or not) in the Saxon tongue?
Months later, I was leading a service in Poland, where I learned that “God” in Polish is Bóg. Who are they kidding? Bóg?! Bóg is the name a comic book writer would give to a lousy villain’s sidekick. Certainly not the Grand Creator of the Universe.
Then again, my English language conception of the world, which sounds so natural and right to me, probably sounds bizarro to everyone else. Perhaps Babel was no catastrophe, but a miracle: the beginning of words’ multiplicity. There is merit in a mother tongue, but even more in the poetic infinitude of her generations and generations of offspring.
Deuteronomy, the fifth and final book of the Torah, opens: “אֵ֣לֶּה הַדְּבָרִ֗ים אֲשֶׁ֨ר דִּבֶּ֤ר מֹשֶׁה֙ אֶל־כׇּל־יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל These are the words that Moses addressed to all Israel.” Dvar has many meanings: speech, news, promise, thing, history, concern, question, cause, lawsuit. Most often, this first line is translated as above or “these are the commandments.” My preferred translation for dvar at this pivotal moment in the text: “These are the incidents . . .”
The history of the world - and each of our lives - is a series of incidents that we tend to look back upon as auspicious or unfortunate. These value judgements, however, are incorrect in themselves. The pilot word of Deuteronomy is “אֵ֣לֶּה - these,” the particularity, the choosing, the thisness of whatsoever the “devarim” to-do list may entail.
Faith - faith in “these” - is not a belief in something’s contested existence, to which one votes “Yes, it is.” Faith is a continual decision - bolstered by spiritual and religious practices - to perceive the inchoate, pre-valenced, raw incidents of one’s life and world as “This is it.” All that ever was, is, will be. This is Good. And this is Love. Far easier said than done, let alone intuited.
So: all of Deuteronomy’s ODP will be one long essay in 11 parts, the number of weekly parashas (not necessarily in response to them). I present my concise theosophy at this point in time.
I won’t bludgeon you with a zealous rant for three months, nor droll out a mandatory Econ 101 lecture like a tenured post-geriatric prof who just won’t retire. It will be fun(!), hopefully like a Hegel-ish labyrinthine philosophy presented with the play and clarity of a Duolingo quiz.
(One big caveat for the next 11 weeks: You will most likely disagree with me at some point, even after just the first quiz below. Please: bear with me. I’m drawing out an alternative way of perceiving the world, and in doing so, I’m redefining numerous words whose meanings you might hold dearly. I will frequently counter your intuition. Give the benefit-of-the-doubt to my logic, and many points will become clearer and “Truer” as the quizzes progress. And no categories that I define are absolute; all the dichotomies I express are spectrums, not binaries.)
Alas, my title and thesis:
Religion is the Only TED Talk You’ll Ever Need
Apologetics for the Unamused
(in three parts: Technology, Entertainment, & Design)
Part 1: Technology
What’s a tool versus a machine?
Before I offer my own definition, make your own decision after classifying the technologies below into tools or machines:
Tools and machines are two types of technologies. They produce or transform something else. They have a goal, and if they don’t fulfill that goal, then they don’t work, and are therefore not worth using. If they’re broken, we can either fix them or dispose of them. (I know this sounds offensably elementary, but this definition will come in handy when we contrast “tools and machines” with less self-evident concepts.)
Tools and machines do not differ in what they can produce or transform, nor is one necessarily more efficient than the other. It’s tempting to hypothesize that machines produce things at faster speeds and lower qualities, whereas tools produce things at slower speeds and higher qualities, but this often isn’t so.
Tools and machines differ in the relation and gravity of a user’s skill to the technology’s efficacy: a person’s skill, experience, and relation with a tool directly affects its efficacy; for a machine, once a person has acquired a basic threshold of ability, i.e. one has been “trained” or “certified” to use it, that person’s additional experience with using the machine will marginally affect its efficacy.
Here’s my answer key to the quiz:
Compare a knife to a blender. A knife’s utility is obvious, such that a 5-year-old can explain how-it-works just by looking at it (it’s a sharp edge with a handhold, and you can push it into objects to cut them). Beyond that, a knife’s efficacy depends more on the skill of its user than the knife per se (assuming it is sharp and holdable enough to use). A person’s chopping skills can increase throughout one’s life in accord with more experience and purpose, such that every knife one uses increases in efficacy.
A blender, on the other hand, hides its how-to. I can gather that it has a container, a spinning blade, an engine, buttons and toggles, and a cable that brings electricity. I don’t really know how-it-works though. After an instruction demo, one has been fully trained, and the blender’s efficacy remains static and unaffected by whoever uses it (assuming users have been trained). You can use a blender 5 or 500 times and, apart from its own natural wear, it will work with the same efficacy and quality no matter who uses it. Unlike the universality of a knife’s how-to, if you borrow a friend’s blender with a different toggle system, you’ll need a new training demo.
Three clarifications:
It may be tempting to categorize tools as analog and machines as electronic, but this isn’t always so. For example, both film and digital cameras are tools (though digital cameras are closer to the machine side of the spectrum) because their usefulness and quality depend most on the photographer’s skill, experience, and eye. Clocks and scales are machines regardless of analog or digital form; once you know how to use them, they either work or don’t. Likewise a sundial, though seeming rustic and “tool-ish,” is a machine. There’s not quite a range of “skill” in telling the hour or weighing a potato.
Not always but most often, a machine requires an external source to work, whereas tools only need a user. Ovens require gas or electricity, clocks and scales need calibration to an arbitrary unit system of time or mass, a lamp needs fire or electricity, etc. Tools operate independently. In turn, there’s a pleasure in the transparency of a technology’s how-to. I think that part of what subconsciously drives a DIY culture’s affinity for bicycles is that their guts are open to the wind; if something breaks, it’s a bummer, but fixing it isn’t hidden from perception. There’s a deep appeal in the, say, honesty, perhaps even the vulnerability, and of a complex machine with a see-through engine.
A friend who read an earlier draft of this essay commented, “What’s a computer? You could easily make a strong case for it being either tool or machine, or both.” I thought much about this question, and my current answer (hopefully not a cop-out) is that the physical object of a computer is a machine, however the digital content of a computer screen is neither tool nor machine, rather it is a “domain” for various digital technologies. A kitchen, hospital, highway, church, etc are also domains for various technologies that they comprise. I propose that, within a computer, a program like Adobe Illustrator is a tool, whereas an Internet search engine is a machine. To be sure, tools can be needed to invent new machines as much as machines can be needed to invent new tools, such as the tool of Adobe Illustrator could not exist without the invention and collaboration of numerous machines that came before it.
In short, the efficacy, efficiency, materiality and purpose of a technology do not determine whether it is a tool or machine, but primarily its potential for relationship with its user(s).
Interruption: What the heck does all this have to do with theology? Supreme question, kiddo.
As they say, God is everywhere, but God is not in things per se. God is present (or absent) in the relations among things. If you are alone and feel God’s presence, there must be something else there, a second side that completes the bridge to you (this could be nature, a ritual, a fortuity - a sacred frame for a relationship). We’re deeply engaged in subconscious relations with everything around us all the time, not just the people who happen to be in the same room as us.
I begin with this paradigm of tools and machines because it helps redefine “relationship” in concrete, mundane, not woo-woo ways. I’m conducting an empirical study of the cohesive relationship that governs1 all varieties of relationships.
(Marx countered Hegel’s Geist, the dialectic evolving “spirit” of history, with his insistence on “historical materialism” and, in turn, its justice. In the same way, I insist on theological materialism.)
I use the word “govern” in the sense that physicists say the universe is “governed” by, say, the four laws of thermodynamics. We can observe universal governing laws, causes-and-effects, which manifest in infinite forms.